I don’t think Sabine Hossenfelder gets everything right, (she should stay away from talking about consciousness), but I love it when she goes on these eviscerating rants about some other physicists. She’s right, much of the field, like economics, is dominated by people who can only say one “correct” version of things to keep their jobs.

For anybody interested in such things, this guy is one of the best English language news sources on Chinese space developments.

As ever he has got so many interesting things to say. He makes a connection here between the first two centuries after the introduction of the printing press in Europe, and how artificial intelligence is due to affect us very soon. Contrary to the optimistic interpretation that the printing press led directly to The Enlightenment (which was true eventually) for the first two centuries it just led to the medieval version of clickbait, with people consuming content that led to religious intolerance and witch hunts.

When might it integrate Lemmy?

Renewables are way, way cheaper. Nuclear is finished. I’m sick of hearing its supporters never ending excuses.

Great info. Out of curiosity what does your hosting setup say about visitor numbers? Futurology.today uses Cloudflare. They give a figure of about 10k per day for what they call unique visitors. That seems unduly high when you look at how busy our lemmy instance actually is. We have just short of 1K subscribers, so I would assume visitor numbers would be lower than 10k per day.

If you haven’t seen any of the classic late 60s/early 70s horror movies, they are worth checking out. ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, 'The Exorcist, ‘Don’t Look Now’, or ‘The Omen’ are all fantastic.

It should also worry investors open-source AI is only months behind the big tech leaders. I looked into AI voice cloning lately. There’s a few really pricey options. Like $25 a month for a couple of hours voice cloning.

However, there’s already an open-source version of what they’re selling.

I wonder when this is going to seriously affect world oil demand? People used to think “Peak Oil” would be when supply was constrained, it turns out it will be when demand is constrained.

Ukraine deserves to be in the EU, but they’ve a long way to go, and its not just the war. They have a vast corruption problem which needs fixing before becoming one with the other EU nations. The EU should start a process that ties progress on that, to getting nearer to EU membership.

Yes, its hard to understand. On the other hand our results on cloudflare look way too good to be true. They say the fediverse site had 180K unique visitors in its first month and almost 3 million of what it calls “total requests”.

It’s hard to figure out what this means in terms of how many people on the fediverse are seeing the content, both from our site, and where its coming up in federated instances.

and why would they? … they are pretty happy with what they have now.

Exactly. Only a very small number of people are motivated as the pioneers who’ve setup the fediverse now are. Again looking at this through the lens of r/futurology & our fediverse site. Why would a user also want to go to a second version of the exact same thing, but way, way smaller.

My hunch is that long-term the fediverse will prosper. Reddit still isn’t too bad even with these changes, at least not compared to what an absolute shithole Twitter has become.

But people who care about making it bigger, should be asking themselves hard questions - this meme comes across as very complacent & out of touch, if many people really believe the sentiments it’s expressing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15wi75l/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_at/

It’s hard to know exactly how many people see them from the stats Reddit gives Mods. Reddit gives a figure within the post for views, which stands at about 160,000 for the post I mentioned. That includes the times people have been served the title in their feed & and the times people clicked on it (sadly Reddit doesn’t differentiate further).

The fediverse site has been going for 6 weeks and has about 620 subscribers. My guestimate from looking at addresses in comments is that maybe 100-150 are reddit migrants. So roughly speaking 1 in 1000 r/futurology people who saw something about our fediverse site were motivated to join.

A sobering thought for people who think the fediverse is about to crush reddit.

I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I’m one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - https://futurology.today/ ) It’s been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.

This is despite the fact we’ve permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.

Since they are US banks, they would just move the financing to the US

No, they are in Ireland because the EU requires some of their operations to physically be located in the EU, to have access to the EU single market.

Ireland needs to tackle this by getting EU-wide consensus. It already has tough climate requirements for domestic banks, these banks are foreign subsidiaries (mostly American) based in Dublin to be in the EU. If just one EU country gets tough on them, they’ll move to another. This action needs to be tied to their access to Europe & done at the EU-level.

I’d love to have more Mastodon stuff in my lemmy feed. Shame its virtually impossible as far as I can see. Do you have any idea when lemmy devs might change this?

Shame nothing works the other way around yet. The only option Lemmy seems to give is to DM a mastodon account & even that doesn’t seem to work (at least it didn’t for me).

incoming reddit users could be a huge benefit (familiarity) And maybe add those options (a. & old.) on the side panel with a link for tutorials how to use Lemmy and its apps

Yes, I’ve been thinking about how to make it as simple as possible to understand for reddit users. Where we explained it here, is an attempt to reduce things to the simplest language - https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15pbknv/do_you_have_some_time_to_take_a_look_at/

Thank you. This is very helpful. Someone else questioned why we are even using email verification as they said few other instances are using it.

We’d assumed it was important from the perspective of bots, trolling, spam, etc But it seems to be at the root of the problems we’ve been having.